If I may quote Pete Brown about the current state of cask beer "Cask ale’s health has recently gone into severe decline. Over the twelve
months to February 2018, and in the twelve months before that, cask volume declined by over 4% each year – that means almost ten per cent of the entire cask market has vanished in the last 24 months."

I have been banging on about the quality of cask beer at the point of dispense for a long time now and as cask ale declines (the battle isn't won - if you think it is, stop reading now) so my question is this. Does the confusion sown by murky beer, often unlabelled as such, help or hinder the fight for quality cask beer and the need to find more people to drink it with confidence?

This isn't a pop at Super Crushy. She is entitled to her point of view and in fact
is hardly alone in finding nothing unacceptable in beer that isn't
clear. I merely wish to point out, as a veteran cask ale drinker, one
aspect of the law of unintended consequences, though equally, I don't suggest that the decline in cask beer sales is entirely down to intentional murkiness.

I do suggest, whatever your personal taste and whatever it does or doesn't do for craft beer, that it doesn't help the cause of cask beer much at all. What do you reckon?

At one time if beer was hazy/cloudy, it was sent back. Both sides knew the score. This was an accepted norm which has now been overturned and not I'd venture, without disadvantage.

Sorry about the rogue bullet point. Can't find a way to get rid of it.

31 comments:

I think clarity is a total red herring and has absolutely no bearing on quality. There are plenty of truly first-rate, bright and clean-tasting beers that look like custard; and likewise plenty that are just dreggy messes. By the same token, clear beer can be an indication of one perfectly brewed, matured, kept and served, or that it's had any character it once had filtered out of it. I've had several clear beers that still tasted of dregs.

Clarity, or lack thereof, tells the drinker nothing further about the beer. It doesn't deserve to be part of the debate among educated consumers.

But there's the rub - if cask beer is going to survive and flourish, it needs to have (and keep) a commercial and cultural reach far beyond "educated consumers" (and educated bar staff for that matter). If someone who knows what they're drinking gets a hazy beer from a bar where they know what they're doing, produced by a brewer who knows what they're doing, then everything lines up and everyone's happy. But a lot of the time you can't rely on even one of those conditions being there, let alone all three - and that creates a lot of scope for people to be turned off by badly-conditioned and/or badly-made beer, served under the age-old banner of "supposed to be like that". Real scope for miseducation, too; was it this blog where a regular commenter used to sing the praises of the taste of yeast in murky beer, in a get-with-the-times-granddad sort of way (of course you're meant to taste it!)?

Most cask beer is not drunk by self-styled educated drinkers but by the general public. If they want clear beer, so be it. It makes no sense to expect people to spend their own money on something they don't want. As an experienced real ale drinker, I don't mind a bit of a haze, even if it's not supposed to be there, but I draw the line at something that looks like mushroom soup.

"I don't drink with my eyes" actually isn't true. It has been determined that the appearance of what we consume can actually affect the way we taste it. In terms of beer, all it means you don't mind the cloudy appearance, not that appearance is unimportant to you. Other people will look at a cloudy pint and think, "I wouldn't like that", and, because appearance and taste are interlinked, they probably won't.

I'm certain Tandleman's point about unintended consequences is correct. Cask ale can only survive if it's in a mass market, not if it's only consumed by discerning drinkers, and most of the existing market expects clear beer for their £3+ per pint. It's, frankly, silly to suggest they're wrong.

Personally, I don't mind haze - when it belongs in the beer - and I enjoy some beers where I expect it. For example, I enjoy a hefeweiss and I would prefer a hazy one to a krystal.

However, I think that it is quite likely that Tandleman is right. I am sure that I have read of a barman claiming that a beer was supposed to be murky when it clearly wasn't - maybe it was retiredmartin telling that story, but I might well be wrong. That kind of incident might well deter drinkers from trying cask.

I am also sure that I read something from Moor beer about how there is no reason that unfined and unpasteurised beers shouldn't drop bright, if well kept.

This is why I love beer bloggery. Brilliant stuff. The first comment is sanctimonious nonsense inferring that “educated” beer drinkers don’t care about clarity. If you do, you’re not educated. Suck it up, thickos! Love it. Like there is a university of piss artistry where you can do your honours in craft beer. Rather than beer education simply being a matter of accepting whatever the current orthodoxy and group think is, so you can be recognised by your peers. Ha Ha. How can anyone not love this? What next? Educated consumers of biscuits pontificating on the presence of raisins in a hob nob?

In every other country where murky beer is sold, more often a product of tradition than modern market innovation, they let the punter know it’s cloudy.

Why would you not want to do that? Unless you are requiring “education” prior to buying a beer in order to preserve some sort of snobbery you’ve attached to it? Akin to having rules about the knives and forks and noticing who knows those rules and who doesn’t. Subtle social clues to facilitate snobs. Could it be that it is all craft beer is? A way for snobs to divide from the herd of plebs?

Have a look on twitter and you can see the nerds tweeting, OMG A man in the pub complained his beer was cloudy. Ignorant fool. I’m shaking with rage!

There’s more to inclusivity than price. It also means accepting people that know nothing about beer are decent intelligent people too, just like you, and ensuring they are welcome in you craft beer bar should they choose to venture into it and that they can order a beer and have enough information to hand to get one they might like and not feel like a dick for not knowing what you know, which you know because you are a geeky nerd into such stuff.

Like there is a university of piss artistry where you can do your honours in craft beer.Once you've left your first comment on a beer blog, you're enrolled. Should you decide to set up your own beer blog, you have tenure. Once you're discussing the details of beer instead of just necking it, you are part of beer academia, like it or not.

yes I do think the confusion on both sides of the cask/keg debate on the murk, or need for murk, hinders the battle for quality. Its annoyingly common in places, like that there London, to be served a cask ale, thats murky, not because its meant to be, and maybe its harsh in most cases to say the pub/bar are trying to pass off poor quality as something else, but because they are just as confused as the rest of us what it should be like and havent the time to check, but youll be told invariably its meant to be like that, murkiness is ok dont you know, if you query it, but it probably wont taste that great and most people wont go back to try it again.

but when you hear that some breweries are deliberately murkinising their beers, or leaving instructions to shake keg barrels daily, to ensure they get their craft beer murkiness tick in the box, you do wonder how on earth did we get to here.

What about if the Moor beer goes on too soon, the bartender doesn't know this (and/or doesn't know what they're doing), and the punter is left with a glass full of trub and no way of complaining about it? What then, eh?

(Which sounds like tedious hypothetical what-about-ery, but has actually happened to me.)

Oh, was Phil's reply addressed to me? Well, if I got a bad beer I'd likely return it to the bar and ask for something else. If I repeatedly got bad beers from the same brewery I'd probably stop buying their beers. If I repeatedly got bad beers in the same pub I'd probably stop drinking there. It's not too complicated an if/then matrix.

" Like there is a university of piss artistry where you can do your honours in craft beer.Once you've left your first comment on a beer blog, you're enrolled. Should you decide to set up your own beer blog, you have tenure. Once you're discussing the details of beer instead of just necking it, you are part of beer academia, like it or not."

Cookie once had a beer blog until he got bored with it.Not before everyone else though.

"Does the confusion sown by murky beer, often unlabelled as such, help or hinder the fight for quality cask beer and the need to find more people to drink it with confidence?"

I'm sure it doesn't help but I doubt it's a big factor. I recently did a visit to the UK (Northern Wales, Black Country, Peak district, York, and Edinburgh). The purpose of the vacation was partly because I really like cask ales and wanted to visit the motherland of cask (so to speak). I found many pubs had jars in front of the cask so you could see the color and clarity of the beer and all of them allowed a sample when in doubt if asked. So really not much excuse for being surprised. The only negatives I found was where the beers were just in poor condition and most of those were clear ones. The handful of murky ones I had (at newer breweries like Brew York and Green Duck in Black Country) were all excellent. The handful of bad ones I had were clear ones at pubs that didn't seem to really give much care to it. For example the undrinkable pint of Holdens at a pub in Sedgely and one of the Bathams pubs was off.

I think this has got to be a much larger factor in turning people off cask. Just plain bad beers that shouldn't be served (clear or not). The pubs where there were murky beers (for the most part from what I can recall) the beers were good and the staff helpful. Just my limited experience.

Welcome

A bit of a CV. Tandleman is a veteran beer lover, local CAMRA Chairman and activist, beer writer, beer reviewer and pursuer of all things good in beer. He lives in the North West of England and London. Despite his CAMRA membership, he does not limit himself to cask conditioned beer, though he believes that cask conditioning, when done correctly and appropriately, brings a quality to beer that is hard to equal by any other kind of presentation. He is a strong supporter of Northern methods of beer dispense and avidly detests poorly presented beer and dislikes pasteurisation. He regularly visits Germany, has conducted corporate British and German beer tastings for CAMRA at the Great British Beer Festival where he has worked for years on Biere Sans Frontieres and was Deputy Organiser at CAMRA's very successful National Winter Ales Festival in 2009, 2010, 2011 and 2012 and at the Manchester Beer and Cider Festival from 2013 to date. He admires good brewers wherever they are and has travelled extensively in pursuit of good beer to drink.

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